About: Matt Coles is the Deputy National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. From 1995 until 2010, he was the Director of the ACLU’s LGBT Project. Matt was counsel in Romer v. Evans, which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Colorado’s ban on laws protecting LGB people from discrimination, and counsel for amicii in Lawrence v. Texas, which resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down laws against same-sex intimacy. He’s argued cases challenging the ban on LGBT people in the military and bans on adoption by gay people and he has tried discrimination cases. Matt was the primary drafter of California’s law banning sexual orientation discrimination and he wrote the nation’s first domestic partnership law. He is the author of Try This at Home, a do-it-yourself guide to passing LGBT discrimination laws.

Cosponsored by the David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy 2012-13 Speaker Series, made possible by the generous support of the Margaret Levy Fund.

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